GitHub puts founder on leave, kicks wife out of office after harassment claim

Engineer Julie Horvath quits, alleging sexism and bad behavior.

GitHub has placed one of its three cofounders on leave and barred the cofounder's wife from the office while it investigates allegations made by a former employee.

Engineer Julie Ann Horvath announced this past weekend that she had left GitHub, describing a toxic office culture in an e-mail interview with TechCrunch. The wife of the cofounder played a prominent role in Horvath's account.

“I met her and almost immediately the conversation that I thought was supposed to be casual turned into something very inappropriate," Horvath told TechCrunch. "She began telling me about how she informs her husband’s decision-making at GitHub, how I better not leave GitHub and write something bad about them, and how she had been told by her husband that she should intervene with my relationship to be sure I was ‘made very happy’ so that I wouldn’t quit and say something nasty about her husband’s company because ‘he had worked so hard.’”

"The wife also claimed to employ 'spies' inside of GitHub and claimed to be able to, again according to Horvath, read GitHub employees’ private chat-room logs, which only employees are supposed to have access to," TechCrunch wrote.

Later, the founder allegedly accused Horvath of threatening his wife and called her a "liar." In the same meeting, the founder allegedly told Horvath that dating a coworker was "bad judgment." Horvath was dating a GitHub employee.

While this was happening, another GitHub employee told Horvath that he had romantic feelings for her. Horvath's rejection of this coworker caused more problems, the TechCrunch report said.

"According to Horvath, the engineer, 'hurt from my rejection, started passive-aggressively ripping out my code from projects we had worked on together without so much as a ping or a comment. I even had to have a few of his commits reverted. I would work on something, go to bed, and wake up to find my work gone without any explanation,'" TechCrunch reported.

On Twitter, Horvath wrote that she was "harassed by 'leadership' at GitHub for two years." She also told TechCrunch that "I had a really hard time getting used to the culture, the aggressive communication on pull requests and how little the men I worked with respected and valued my opinion."

GitHub CEO and cofounder Chris Wanstrath issued a statement yesterday describing how the company will proceed. In addition to the cofounder and his wife, the aforementioned engineer was put on leave.

"We know we have to take action and have begun a full investigation," Wanstrath wrote. "While that’s ongoing, and effective immediately, the relevant founder has been put on leave, as has the referenced GitHub engineer. The founder’s wife discussed in the media reports has never had hiring or firing power at GitHub and will no longer be permitted in the office."

GitHub's three cofounders are Wanstrath, PJ Hyett, and Tom Preston-Werner. Wanstrath and Horvath have not revealed which cofounder is at the center of this controversy.

UPDATE: Valleywag reports that it has "confirmed with someone with internal knowledge of GitHub" that Preston-Werner and his wife, Theresa, are the couple described by Horvath. "We're told this is certainly not the first time the Preston-Werners have treated a female employee this way: Melissa Severini, the company's very first hire, was allegedly paid to sign a non-disparagement agreement after being fired after her own blowup with Theresa Preston-Werner," Valleywag wrote. "Other employees have been pressured to do pro bono work for Theresa Preston-Werner's own startup, Omakase."

GitHub, founded in 2008 and based in San Francisco, offers a hosted service for software projects that makes it easier for developers to collaborate and review code. GitHub can be used for both open and closed projects, but it hosts open source projects for free and calls itself the "world's largest open source community."

In addition to being a designer and front-end developer, Horvath created GitHub's Passion Projects, which "seeks to surface and celebrate the work of incredible women in our industry, as well as produce more female role models within the tech community."

In his statement, Wanstrath said he is "deeply saddened" by the incident involving Horvath and that he is "super thankful to Julie for her contributions to GitHub. Her hard work building Passion Projects has made a huge positive impact on both GitHub and the tech community at large, and she's done a lot to help us become a more diverse company. I would like to personally apologize to Julie. It’s certain that there were things we could have done differently. We wish Julie well in her future endeavors."

Wanstrath noted that GitHub has faced new challenges during its rapid growth over the last two years. "Nearly a year ago we began a search for an experienced HR Lead and that person came on board in January 2014," he wrote. "We still have work to do. We know that. However, making sure GitHub employees are getting the right feedback and have a safe way to voice their concerns is a primary focus of the company."

Promoted Comments

I read the piece on TechCrunch over the weekend and took it with a grain of salt. I'd like to hear more than one side of the story.

GitHub just gave you their side, and it amounted to "pretty much, yeah."

That's the way I took it as well. When a co-founder publicly apologizes to the person making the accusations, and mentions that the company just hired an HR manager because "they have a lot of work to do". It's pretty much a given that what the employee is alleging is true.

So GitHub responded to alleged harassment issue, but as GitHub user the issue that bothers me more is that GitHub would allow people who aren't even their employees to have unaudited access their internal systems. Which IMO is a security breach. They didn't bother to address that issue.

I recall a recent management conference, where a head recruiter said that more and more, firms ask that they make sure the potential new hires have a good amount of emotional intelligence, and mentioned this as a general trend across industries since the last 4 years or so.

Wanstrath wrote. "While that’s ongoing, and effective immediately, the relevant founder has been put on leave, as has the referenced GitHub engineer. The founder’s wife discussed in the media reports has never had hiring or firing power at GitHub and will no longer be permitted in the office."

GitHub's three cofounders are Wanstrath, PJ Hyett, and Tom Preston-Werner. Wanstrath and Horvath have not revealed which cofounder is at the center of this controversy.

Who wants to place money on the fact it wasn't Wanstrath who made these comments?

If you are in a shitty situation at work, use something like that and nail them to the wall. May not be admissible in court. Doesn't matter. Find a Strickland HR person and show it to them. They'd blow a gasket when they saw the behavior outlined in the article on video, and then you get results.

I read the piece on TechCrunch over the weekend and took it with a grain of salt. I'd like to hear more than one side of the story.

I agree - but this doesn't change the fact that cultures of intimidation and bullying need to be checked and exposed. Especially in the case of female workers in a predominantly male [in this case, coding] culture.

I read the piece on TechCrunch over the weekend and took it with a grain of salt. I'd like to hear more than one side of the story.

GitHub just gave you their side, and it amounted to "pretty much, yeah."

That's the way I took it as well. When a co-founder publicly apologizes to the person making the accusations, and mentions that the company just hired an HR manager because "they have a lot of work to do". It's pretty much a given that what the employee is alleging is true.

If Julie's side of the story is indeed true (and the lack of denial in the official statement is telling of that), I hope she is able to move on without any serious consequences to her career. She could easily be blackballed as a potential liability. Personally, I see standing up to extremely hostile work environments as a positive, not a negative.

I read the piece on TechCrunch over the weekend and took it with a grain of salt. I'd like to hear more than one side of the story.

GitHub just gave you their side, and it amounted to "pretty much, yeah."

That's the way I took it as well. When a co-founder publicly apologizes to the person making the accusations, and mentions that the company just hired an HR manager because "they have a lot of work to do". It's pretty much a given that what the employee is alleging is true.

There were a lot of accusations made. While GitHub has admitted it has a problem, there's still a lot of grey here.

Right. And that's kinda what I'm getting at. She made some specific accusations against the founder, his wife, and a particular engineer. The GitHub response seems to address those specifically, but she also made some pretty broad accusations of a somewhat vague nature about the environment there. I don't feel comfortable drawing any conclusions about how GitHub is being run without more information.

Maybe I'm missing something here, but it sounds like two women who couldn't get along, a high-ranking female employee and a "boss's wife". That dynamic happens in many businesses and causes lots of unnecessary friction.

Your missing the part where a co-worker got rejected and started ripping out code with no notice or reason. And the fact the Boss's wife shouldn't have been at the company.

Maybe I'm missing something here, but it sounds like two women who couldn't get along, a high-ranking female employee and a "boss's wife". That dynamic happens in many businesses and causes lots of unnecessary friction.

except in this case someone is saying the boss's wife is reading people's email and has people in the company reporting to her where she is not an employee of the company

I read the piece on TechCrunch over the weekend and took it with a grain of salt. I'd like to hear more than one side of the story.

GitHub just gave you their side, and it amounted to "pretty much, yeah."

That's the way I took it as well. When a co-founder publicly apologizes to the person making the accusations, and mentions that the company just hired an HR manager because "they have a lot of work to do". It's pretty much a given that what the employee is alleging is true.

I just read it as getting their ducks in a row in case of a lawsuit. true or not this is what any company has to do. you have to prove you did everything you could do within your power.

everyone is going to have their own interpretations of events. i myself have championed friends before in work situations to find out later their side may not have been the right one.

Very rare does office romance blossoms into a life time partnership for philanthropy and charity works. No, most of the time its just awkward mornings afters.

Maybe among the emotionally childish. I met my wife at my last job; I knew of several other people dating within the ranks as well, across departments and hierarchies (this was a company of around 200 people at the time). There were some basic unwritten ground rules we all adhered to (keep the shmoopy stuff out of the office, etc.) but it was never an issue, productivity-wise. Why? because we were all adults and behaved like it.

...and that's precisely what appears to have been the problem at Github. A lack of adult-like behavior.

I read the piece on TechCrunch over the weekend and took it with a grain of salt. I'd like to hear more than one side of the story.

GitHub just gave you their side, and it amounted to "pretty much, yeah."

That's the way I took it as well. When a co-founder publicly apologizes to the person making the accusations, and mentions that the company just hired an HR manager because "they have a lot of work to do". It's pretty much a given that what the employee is alleging is true.

There were a lot of accusations made. While GitHub has admitted it has a problem, there's still a lot of grey here.

Right. And that's kinda what I'm getting at. She made some specific accusations against the founder, his wife, and a particular engineer. The GitHub response seems to address those specifically, but she also made some pretty broad accusations of a somewhat vague nature about the environment there. I don't feel comfortable drawing any conclusions about how GitHub is being run without more information.

That's a fair assessment. Reading between the lines, I would guess that she did try to have those issues addressed, but they weren't to her satisfaction. So she left. I would also guess that she's lawyered-up, and this is the company doing it's best to conduct damage control, least she does sue for a hostile work environment.

An engineer is a professional practitioner of engineering, concerned with applying scientific knowledge, mathematics, and ingenuity to develop solutions for technical problems.

Computers are technical, and code is math, usually. Sure it's not nuclear or electrical but I'd say it applies.

Now, that doesn't mean I'm all for dentists being called Oral Engineers or my wife taking up the title at home of Soda Engineer because she uses a SodaStream, but Software Engineer is a pretty common title that I've never heard someone have an issue with until now.

Her Linkedin says she has a BA in English and her profile says she is a front end web developer.

I think this unintentionally trolls a lot of engineers. Engineers are too busy doing real work to get caught up in this drama.

how many programmers have engineering licenses?

How many programmers are referred to as engineers and shouldn't be?

All of them?

I can say that because I am a programmer and I actually have an engineering degree.

I am also not actually serious.

i used to work for a government organization full of old time engineers. had a talk with one of them one time and he said you are not a real engineer unless you have a license that says you are an engineer. not just a degree